Agile is synonymous with software delivery, although it is being adopted outside of information technology and branching out into other areas. Within the workplace, HR and recruitment are increasingly adopting an Agile approach. The processes followed within these areas of the business can be easily mapped/converted to a Kanban Board. This allows for work in progress to be monitored/limited and for process improvements to be identified and implemented.
But business processes supporting software delivery are not the only areas where Agile is being used. New business are being built upon Agile frameworks/methodologies. Scrum Your Wedding looks to provide advice and guidance on how using Scrum can save time, save money and reduce the stress of planning your wedding. Scrum at School are an organisation offering training at coaching on how Scrum can be used to aid in students learning.
And of course there are also those of us that work on Agile deliveries that bring our work home and set up personal Kanban board, or run Sprints to manage our day-to-day lives. This has left me wondering if there is another area where there is the potential for an Agile implementation that may not yet have been exploited?
I am excited to announce that my wife is expecting our second child.
After my wife informed me that she was pregnant, we started to discuss all the appointments we would need to attend, all the preparations that we would need to make and of course all the things that we would need to purchase. For me there was only one answer, this would need to be an ‘Agile Baby’.
Identifying who would undertake which role was easy. My wife would be the Product Owner, while I would be the Scrum Master. The other member of our delivery team would be my daughter (although she probably won’t be there for the actual delivery). The more difficult question was Scrum or Kanban? Whichever method was to be used, prioritisation will be key as the final delivery date could be brought forward with limited notice.
I then turned my thoughts to the epics that may be required for this delivery, identifying this initial list.
- Appointments
- Room/Furniture
- Clothes
- Sundries (i.e. nappies, wipes etc.)
- Technology
- External Impacts
The next step for this ‘Agile Baby’ is a backlog refinement session where we can start to break the epics into user stories, start the prioritisation process identifying any dependencies and of course, deciding if we are going Scrum or Kanban.